Court Rejects Child Online Protection Act

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected a law that was designed to protect children from pornography on the Internet but was viewed by many as government censorship.

The ruling, which held that the Child Online Protection Act “imposes an impermissible burden on constitutionally protected” speech, was the latest in a series of setbacks for the government in its efforts to regulate content on the Internet.

The 1998 act, which was immediately challenged and never enforced, would have required commercial Web sites to ensure that children do not come into contact with material deemed “harmful to minors.” It set penalties of up to six months in jail and $50,000 fines for each violation.

A district court in Philadelphia had issued an injunction in February 1999 barring the government from enforcing the act.

On Thursday, a panel of three appellate judges for the 3rd District upheld that injunction, saying the logic and language of the act were fatally flawed in the Internet Age.

The judges focused on the practical impossibility of determining “community standards,” a central concept in decency laws, on a medium that has no geographical boundaries.

“The standard by which [the act] gauges whether material is harmful to minors is based on identifying contemporary community standards,” the judges wrote. But that “essentially requires that every Web publisher subject to the statute abide by the most restrictive and conservative state’s community standards in order to avoid criminal liability.”

The government can appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, ask for the entire U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to consider the matter or go back to the lower court and request a full trial.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, which was responsible for defending the law, said the agency is reviewing the ruling but has not decided whether to appeal. Opponents of the law said they hope the government will now drop the case.

“The message this sends is that the government should just stop trying to figure out a way to censor speech on the Internet,” said Ann Beeson, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who led the effort to overturn the law.

Beeson represented 17 plaintiffs who sued the government, including the ACLU itself, booksellers, gay rights groups, medical professionals and a Web site that sells condoms.

The act was crafted by Congress with an eye toward avoiding the problems that befell the earlier Communications Decency Act. That broader law, which made it illegal to distribute indecent material over the Internet, was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1997.